In old noir movies, when two people are about to do the nasty, the scene cuts to waves crashing on the beach, fireworks, hokey shit to hammer the point home, so to speak. Now, the whole thing is splayed out on the screen—trying to compete with hard-core, I guess. I always want to close my eyes. It makes me squirm, the shucking of clothes as soon as the door closes, the trail leading to wherever the action takes place, the female with her bra still on if she has a no-nudity clause in her contract, the over-the-top orgasms. You’re sitting there in the dark with strangers, watching people moan and fake fuck—on kitchen counters, on the floor, up against walls, in cars, on beaches.

All I could think of was Dick, rutting and slobbering all over his latest recruit.

One night, about a week later, Mark met me at the loft after I’d finished a shift. He was quiet that night, had nothing to say about his work. I could tell there was something on his mind—something he wasn’t ready to share. He was jumpy, even ill at ease. I decided not to press him. I wasn’t exactly relaxed myself. I asked him if he wanted a drink, and he immediately took me up on it. He seemed to want to put down whatever he was lugging around. I knew how he felt.

After our second drink, we just kind of drifted toward each other, as if there was no longer any question, like it had to happen, how it was a mystery why it hadn’t happened already. Later, I remembered it in chunks, like one of my disjointed dreams. No matter how many times I went over it—and believe me, I enjoyed doing that—I can’t really describe it, only that it was both beyond what I could have imagined, yet exactly what I had. Not like in those shit movies, more like a choreographed dance where we weren’t even aware of being separate bodies anymore.

There was no clumsiness, no groping or moment when I felt I was watching myself on a screen or through a skylight from a roof—the way I always dreaded it might be—a bad out-of-body experience. I stayed right there. For me, it was like a journey to another country, another planet, where the only conveyance was our own bodies. I undid the buttons of his white shirt, traced his biceps, his pectorals with my tongue—ran it down the fine line of hair that extended from his throat to the top of his low-slung jeans. He stood still, didn’t move until he pulled me to him, picked me up, and brought me to the bed.

I don’t know what got into me, where it came from, but when it arrived, I wanted it to never go away. We could have both died there, and it would have been fine with me. His skin glowed in the flickering candlelight that cast our shadows against the wall and ceiling.

I did naturally what I’d never done before.

I decided to call it love. What else could it be? I couldn’t imagine another’s hands or mouth on me—ever again, in all the time that would be.

Before we fell asleep, I noticed, with a shock, that Mark had several bruises on his neck. I traced them with my finger. “Wow,” said Mark, before he nodded off. “That was… crazy.”

I had no memory of making those marks. I was horrified by them. What the hell was I thinking? Was I thinking? What if somebody saw them? Then Mark rolled over, and I saw that his back had been raked, as if by a cat.

Oh shit, what have you done? Did you black out, have a seizure?

Suddenly I was scared.

“Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m a big boy, and I can take whatever you dish out. In fact, why don’t you dish me out some more of that?”

And I did—plenty more. I couldn’t stop myself. I felt no warning tingle in my spine. What I did feel were his strong, slender hands on it, from the nape of my neck down to my tail bone.

I didn’t know it then, but when Mark got up in the morning to make coffee, he found the single earring in that little dish by the sink—a ruby stud. Of course, the cop in him didn’t allow him to reveal a thing to me—not then. He just stashed it in his jacket pocket and made coffee. Then he said he needed to get to the precinct, although he didn’t want to leave. He promised he’d see me soon. He kissed me then, and held me so close, our bodies seemed to merge. I was high on him.

That morning, after Mark split, I started to get antsy again. I’d forgotten all about the stud, didn’t even remember to take it out of the dish and stash it somewhere. Khalika felt closer than ever, and I knew she’d know what had happened—what she’d warned me could never happen.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing,” she’d say, “and a cop yet? What’s up—you dick-whipped now?”

The previous night was starting to seem unreal, and I almost went downstairs to call Mark to confirm it happened.

After making the bed and getting dressed, something beckoned me toward the little room off the kitchen that I used as a storage area. Khalika’s sealed boxes. Why had I never opened them? Why the sudden impulse to do it now—one I couldn’t seem to ignore?

Because I never told you to, I could hear her exasperated response. But now something was telling me, like the insistent drip of a faucet, and I couldn’t tell if it was her or something else. At least my back was quiet, and for that I was thankful. Maybe she had given up, or was trying a new communication method. But why now, after the dream-like night with Mark? Why ask anyway? Just do it. I pulled a knife from a drawer and sliced through the tape on a box marked “Future Screenplays.”

I stared at the contents for a moment before I opened a red loose-leaf folder. It was filled with Khalika’s writings, from childhood through to the present, organized in date order, with notations in the margins. The earlier writings were penned in a childish scrawl, but still very clear in their depictions. This was a diary of sorts, but a detached one, where the writer’s identity remained hidden, were it not for the authors’ names on the front of the binder. The cover had “Khalika and Violet DeLoache’s Movie Scenes” written on it in neat block letters. After I finished reading a few, I sat back, dizzy, in shock, my head in my hands.

I don’t know how long I sat there, my head swimming, my eyes streaming. At first I couldn’t process it. It came in waves, until the full picture swam into focus.

They told the whole story, in lurid detail—everything Khalika had done. Even worse, it was written like a movie unfolding, frame by frame, except, after each scene, Khalika had written, “To be continued…” The scene set up, the dialog—just like how she had described that day in Dick’s office. That was in there too, just as she’d performed it for me in the barn. The girl in the shower, at the end: I realized it must must have been Khalika herself—doing what she does—what she has always done..

What is a poet who kills?

Here it was—all of it, in one folder, no imagination necessary: how she dispatched Dollar Man, leaving her first note in Latin: Natura non constristatur—‘Nature is not saddened.’ I realized, with another savage jolt, what had been lurking at the back of my mind when Mark told me about the killer’s calling cards. I read how Dollar Man had been found in his car the morning he tried to lure me into it, sitting up straight, stiff as an ice statue, the coin on the seat, between his legs. Behind his shattered glasses (“I ground them under my foot, put them back on his dead fucking face”), his eyes had been gouged out; a screwdriver was poking from the hollow of his throat. “The blood,” she wrote, “staining his thrift-shop white shirt crimson.”

Khalika didn’t stint. She told how she’d gone back to where he was parked, how Dollar Man believed that I—her spitting image, after all—had returned for the shiny object. He’d rolled down the window, not believing his good fortune. I snared one!

“Hi,” she’d said, smiling her gap-tooth smile. “I’m Khalika. Can I have that dollar? I need to buy my mommy a present and I already spent my allowance. I’ll pay you back!”

He said sure, fished around in his pants pocket, and brought out the coin, held it up, and faced her. Then he grabbed her forearm. That was when she pulled the screwdriver from under her pants waistband and jammed it in his “pencil neck’ ” to the hilt, the blood spurting from his fingers onto her jacket, her blouse with the cherries printed on it, into her braided rosewood hair, soaking the pervert and the upholstery in his bomb car. When he quit jerking around and choking and his hands dropped to his sides, she reached in, tilted his head back, dug in and scooped out his “blue marble” eyes with a demitasse spoon she’d taken from the kitchen. She had to work at that, she said, was surprised how much stuff holds a person’s eyes in their head. “It’s nothing like the movies.” Then she destroyed his thick, coke-bottle lens glasses, “just for the fuck of it.”

“It’s a stringy mess,” she wrote. “Like calamari in red sauce, and I started to feel a little sick.” She added camera shots, angles, everything. She wrote that this movie should be nominated for an Oscar for sure—especially for special effects and maybe cinematography.

She told how she hadn’t been seen, that people don’t notice much unless it’s shoved in their faces, and even then… she said she could have done back flips in her bloody clothes and nobody would have noticed. If they did, she would have said she spilled a bottle of ketchup on herself. She wrote how she sprinted back to the estate, winding up her scene for the segue, where she ditched the evidence. She washed the predator’s blood off in the pond. Then she went back to the house, stripped down, changed, and burned the clothes behind the barn. I never heard her, could never have imagined in a million years she’d be capable of that at her age—at our ages.

What she described as “his cigarette dick” flopped out of his fly, “a deflated purple balloon.” Khalika may have been verbally terse, but in her writing, she was verbose, scrupulous in her detail. She described how she skipped off the curb that day just as he’d taken his dick out and was jerking off. She’d taken him completely by surprise It was near dark, so no one was around. “Glurrrrkk… agggghhhhh…” she’d written for his dialog.

Then Khalika’s voiceover: “Huh? I don’t understand! Just hurry up an’ go to Jesus, OK, shithead? I think he lives in Kansas. I’d stick around, but I have a 9 p.m. curfew and Mommy worries like fuck when I’m late. Oh yeah, and I gotta buy her that present.”

I remembered how Khalika told me, after it came out in the papers, that he got what he deserved, that he’d never get the chance again to try to snatch her sister or anybody else. “Yes,” she wrote, “a meal for the flies to feast upon, in his shit car, with his dead dick flopped out.” She’d drawn a smiley face on the windshield with his own blood. That was in the paper. I remembered her telling me about it, laughing at the meager details in the paper. Khalika ended the scene with the Mighty Mouse theme song, in honor of saving the day. She had composed this scene right before our twelfth birthday—not long before she split from Hell House, pretty much for good, until… that night.

I had suppressed it all these years, and now it hit me hard enough to knock me backward against the wall. How could a kid manage it—what had those monsters made of my sister? What had they let loose in the world? How many others…

Then I remembered how I felt after the alley caper—how I’d always thought she was up to no good—how it secretly excited me. I couldn’t go on, yet I was compelled to—a robot, reading about those two jocks and their girlfriends. How, after they’d made fun of me one day, a day I could hardly recall, Khalika showed up at Demo’s house when I told her they’d invited me to participate in one of their home movies.

“The morons,” she wrote, “never saw it coming.”

I was near passing out, but I couldn’t put the red folder down. My hands, acting independently of my will, flipped the pages, unable to stop reading. She’d done sketches of everything too. She described how, after they’d ordered her to make them, she laced their drinks with drugs from Bianca’s massive stash. Then, after they passed out, she sliced their throats and painted their faces yellow to look like the “have a nice day” button. She used a magic marker to draw X’s over their eyes and drew frownie mouths on them. She arranged them in a tangle, bloody clowns in mid-orgy. The note, in Latin, left at the scene: Ars longa, vita brevis—‘Art is long, life is short.’